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Today is the birthday of one of the best web browsers you can run, in my opinion of course. Google Chrome turns 2 today and with that, Google rolled out a stable version 6.0. What could Google do to make web browsing even better, you ask? Well, this version of Google Chrome is promising to be faster and have a simplified user interface. How much easier can it get?

Javascript performance is a big deal these days and the version 6.0 of Chrome is said to be up to 3 times faster than when the first version was released way back in 2008. For starters, Google switched up a couple of things, including moving some buttons around, adjusting the color schemes, combining two menus and put a little shine on the URL box.

To put it plainly, Google has been working on simplifying the “chrome” of Chrome, said Brian Rakowski a Google product manager. With these subtle, yet important changes, Google is hoping to keep the browser fast and modern with use of applications that can be found in the Google Chrome Web Store.

The Google Chrome Web Store is NOT open just yet, but there was reports that it might be all set by October of this year. That is only a month away. Developers got a chance to check out the store and already have access to uploading apps, check out how packaging works and get their apps installed on Chrome.

Brian Rakowski also mentioned that Google has ramped up the updates for Chrome in order to get improvements and features to users more quickly!

Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Japan’s public pension fund, the world’s largest, will increase asset sales by more than five times to about 4 trillion yen ($48 billion) this fiscal year as payouts rise with the nation’s population aging.

That follows 720 billion yen raised in the fiscal year ended in March, all through sales of its Japanese bond holdings, Takahiro Mitani, president of the Government Pension Investment Fund, said in an interview in Tokyo yesterday. Japanese bonds accounted for 71 percent of the GPIF’s 117 trillion yen of assets as of June 30, while domestic stocks made up 11 percent, the fund’s statements show.

“Insurance premiums rise little by little every year, but it isn’t catching up with the increase in payouts,” said Mitani, a former executive director at the Bank of Japan. Bonds are the most suitable asset to sell at this moment, he said, without detailing whether they would again be the only securities sold.

The fund manages workers’ retirement funds in the most rapidly aging population among Group of Seven nations. The first of Japan’s baby boomers will turn 65 in 2012, making them eligible for pension payments and straining the public coffers.

Japanese government bonds have returned 2.5 percent this year, according to an index compiled by Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch unit. In contrast, the Nikkei 225 Stock Average has lost 14 percent, the second-worst performer after China’s Shanghai Composite Index in the world’s 30 biggest stock markets, Bloomberg data show.

Aging Population

“The 4 trillion yen figure exceeds my estimate of about 3 trillion yen,” said Takahiro Tsuchiya, a strategist at Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd. in Tokyo. “Given bond yields have fallen this much, the fund is more likely to sell domestic bonds, and I don’t think they will sell stocks at this moment.”

People aged at least 65 years accounted for 22.2 percent of Japan’s population as of the end of last year, the highest among the G-7 nations, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That compares with 12 percent in 1990. About 8 million, or 6 percent of the population, were born between 1947 and 1949, regarded as the baby boomer generation in Japan, government data indicate.

Japan’s 10-year bond yields fell to a seven-year low of 0.895 percent on Aug. 25. Yields have surged since then on speculation a successful leadership challenge by Ichiro Ozawa would lead to a government that would issue more debt to fund spending programs.

Benchmark 10-year yields surged 14 basis points this week, heading for the biggest five-day advance since the period ended May 16, 2008.

Ozawa Challenge

Ozawa, who heads the ruling party’s largest faction, said last week he will challenge Prime Minister Naoto Kan at the Democratic Party of Japan’s leadership contest on Sept. 14. He has pledged to double a monthly childcare allowance and extend the period of subsidies for energy-efficient household appliances. The winner is assured of being prime minister because the DPJ controls the lower house.

“I’m very concerned about Japan’s fiscal condition, but I don’t think bond yields will surge to 2 or 3 percent soon,” Mitani, 61, said. “If the government takes no action, there’s no doubt that the nation’s finances will become unbalanced sometime in the future.”

Japan’s public debt is approaching 200 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the highest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to the OECD.

--Editors: Garfield Reynolds, Nicholas Reynolds.

To contact the reporters on this story: Keiko Ujikane in Tokyo at kujikane@bloomberg.net; Masaki Kondo in Tokyo at mkondo3@bloomberg.net; Tatsuo Ito in Tokyo at tito2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rocky Swift at rswift5@bloomberg.net

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, yesterday told us what he thinks is the most important lesson to learn from the financial crisis. Drum roll. And the answer is?

Putting a stop to banks that are "too big to fail", according to the testimony he gave yesterday to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in Washington.

This is not a conclusion that will surprise many or cause controversy. The question, however, for Bernanke and his UK counterpart Mervyn King, is how exactly?

In the US, central bankers and regulators believe an end of too big to fail will result from changed and improved regulation, stemming mainly from the new Dodd-Frank legislation. There is now a framework in the US designed to address so-called "systemic risk", where dangerous financial practices are identified and curtailed on an economy-wide basis, together with rules on how failing firms should be dismantled in an orderly way plus greater regulatory co-operation.

The debate in the UK is rather less settled. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We have an opportunity to get banking supervision right, as far as we can with Brussels breathing down our neck. But while it will never be perfect, we can ensure it's better than anyone else's.

The Treasury has begun an important consultation period on its reforms to regulation centred on breaking up the Financial Services Authority and placing bank regulation back with the Bank of England. The plan is to have a Prudential Regulatory Authority to supervise individual firms linked to a separate Financial Policy Committee to regulate systemic risks. So far so good.

But the Treasury's final plans will also be coloured by the findings of Sir John Vickers' Independent Commission on Banking set up by George Osborne. Its remit is to formulate policy recommendations by September next year in the exact area that Bernanke was discussing yesterday - too big to fail, otherwise know as moral hazard, and systemic risk. There are others, such as promoting competition, but these are the most important.

Government ministers such as Vince Cable, the business secretary, have already decided the Commission should conclude the best policy is to force banks to be broken up. Consumer-friendly retail banks, that simply take deposits and make loans, will be split from the "casino capitalism" of investment banking arms which took the sort of bets that created many of the losses at the heart of the financial crisis. A dotted line will be drawn and two separately capitalised and staffed business will be formed.

Unfortunately, as Sir John will find, banking doesn't work like that. The simple, utility banks imagined simply don't exist. Even the apparently most benign mutual building society routinely pays investment banks so they can play in sophisticated capital markets. This is to ensure that the essential social use of all banks – transforming short-term deposits into long-term loans – can actually take place. In other words, the boundaries between retail and investment banking are extremely blurred, if not invisible. Imposing an arbitrary dotted line, and then cutting along it, is far from certain to enhance efficiency, leading to consumers getting a worse deal, not a better one.

There are therefore plenty of senior voices in the Treasury who are determined to make sure that formal separation does not become Government policy.

Which brings us to what the Bank of England believes. As the future regulator, Mervyn King's views on this are crucial. He wants an end to banks that are "too important to fail", correctly identifying that small banks can be just as risky as large banks if they're allowed to assume the Bank of England will always act as a lender of last resort. Better regulation is step one to removing this moral hazard but step two, for King, is to break up banks so they are separately, and much more highly, capitalised. Shareholders in investment banks would have no recourse to lender-of-last resort facilities and would be liable, along with bond holders, for 100pc of losses. But this does not address the central problem of where you draw the dotted line. In reality it would be the proprietary trading desks of banks that could be unequivocally defined as "casino banking". These trade, or bet, with a bank's capital to generate profit. If hived off they would simply become hedge funds – the sort of solution envisaged by President Barack Obama back in January which fizzled out.

Whether such an arrangement would go far enough to satisfy King is uncertain. It may not, highlighting the looming clash, sorry debate, between the Bank and some in the Treasury who believe splitting banks is untenable. How deep those divisions will go and how serious the disagreements become will be fascinating to observe. If King doesn't get his way, what then?

One compromise would be to adopt the sort of solution envisaged by Lord Turner, currently chairman of the FSA. He thinks it's possible to force banks to separate their operations internally, and allocate separate pools of capital to fund them, all policed by the regulator. Again whether King would be happy to adopt Lord Turner's view is a moot point. It could be that the argument over how you solve too big to fail is the sort of argument that's too big to lose.